JOHN MUIR WAS haunted by what he experienced on St. Lawrence Island. “The scene was indescribably ghastly,” he wrote, noting its stark juxtapositions. “Gulls, plovers, and ducks were swimming and flying about in happy life, the pure salt sea was dashing white against the shore, the blooming tundra swept back to the snow-clad volcanoes,” yet the village lay “in the foulest and most glaring death.”
